Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
10 - The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbrevations
- Introduction: A History of Calamities: The Culture of Castration
- 1 Raised Voices: The Archaeology of Castration
- 2 The Aesthetics of Castration: The Beauty of Roman Eunuchs
- 3 Appropriation and Development of Castration as Symbol and Practice in Early Christianity
- 4 ‘Al defouleden is holie bodi’: Castration, the Sexualization of Torture, and Anxieties of Identity in the South English Legendary
- 5 The Children He Never Had; The Husband She Never Served: Castration and Genital Mutilation in Medieval Frisian Law
- 6 The Fulmannod Society: Social Valuing of the (Male) Legal Subject
- 7 ‘Imbrued in their owne bloud’: Castration in Early Welsh and Irish Sources
- 8 Castrating Monks: Vikings, the Slave Trade, and the Value of Eunuchs
- 9 ‘He took a stone away’: Castration and Cruelty in the Old Norse Sturlunga saga
- 10 The Castrating of the Shrew: The Performance of Masculinity and Masculine Identity in La dame escolliee
- 11 Eunuchs of the Grail
- 12 Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in Guillaume de Lorris's Romans de la rose
- 13 Culture Loves a Void: Eunuchry in De Vetula and Jean Le Févre's La Vieille
- 14 The Dismemberment of Will: Early Modern Fear of Castration
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Seemingly rooted in the shrew-taming tradition, the Old French fabliau La dame escolliee (The Gelded Lady) defies the rules of any genre in which it is placed. As a fabliau, the setting, characters and the disturbingly graphic violence diverge from the usually light-hearted comedy typical of the fabliaux. As a shrew-taming tale, the story breaks several of the genre's conventions, which generally work to confirm the accepted social order of male dominance and female submission in a marital relationship. In its graphic depiction of a fake castration performed on a woman, La dame escolliee does not restore masculine order and dominance, but transforms a female body into a male one through a violent performance, challenging the very concept of what masculinity is. The husband of the castrated woman is not the one who punishes her. His passivity makes him more feminine than masculine in many ways. The man who performs the false castration (the woman's son-in-law) presents a harsh and exaggerated form of masculinity that insists on a narrow construct of maleness that destabilizes the very structures it seemingly tries to preserve. By undermining his father-in-law and transforming his mother-in-law, the supposed shrew-tamer reveals inherent problems with such a limited view of masculinity. The use of a false castration on a woman changes the purpose of the performance and moves the dynamic of the tale from a tale about the proper role of women to a cautionary tale for men and masculine identity.
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- Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages , pp. 210 - 228Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013